State Secrets

In speeches, President Obama likes to quote something that Martin Luther King, Jr., used to say: that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Yesterday, after the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled that people claiming to be torture victims of a U.S.-run intelligence program could get no day in court, it was hard not to feel that the short arc of the Obama Administration has bent, in this instance, toward injustice.

An eleven-judge panel sided, 6-5, with lawyers working for Obama’s Justice Department, which essentially claimed that protecting state secrets is more important than protecting human rights. Amazingly, the Justice Department argued successfully that the entire subject of “extraordinary rendition”—dispatching torture suspects to other countries to be interrogated harshly—was so sensitive that it had to be hidden from the American public, to the point of barring its victims from seeking redress in court. The court accepted this logic even though Hollywood has already released a high-profile movie about the subject—“Rendition,” starring Reese Witherspoon—and countless articles have been published about the controversial practice. Particularly troubling, the government was not merely intent on hiding sensitive facts in the case—such as agents’ names, or liaison countries’ identities—but, rather, on placing a legal shroud over the entire C.I.A. program.

The case began, in a small way, with The New Yorker. In 2006, a morally stricken former employee of Jeppesen Dataplan, a division of Boeing, spoke with me, anonymously, about the company’s participation in planning secretive international flights for the C.I.A. In a Talk of the Town story, “The C.I.A.’s Travel Agent,” the former employee recalled attending a meeting in which Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said, “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights—you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.” (Overby declined to comment for the story.) In 2007, the former employee agreed to work with the A.C.L.U., which brought a suit against Jeppesen.

Much has been written about the denial of due process for the five plaintiffs who claim to have been victims of the extraordinary-rendition program. But equally disturbing is the message that this verdict sends to individual American citizens, like the former Jeppesen employee, who felt a call to conscience that made him speak out, even at the risk to his own future employment, because he believed that secret kidnapping and torture were crimes in a country founded on the idea that all people, not just Americans, have inalienable rights, including protection from cruel and inhumane punishment. That his allegations could receive a public hearing in the press, but not a legitimate hearing in the American system of justice—even under an Administration headed by a former professor of constitutional law—is a daunting reflection of the clout wielded by the national-security bureaucracy in Washington, in the age of the Long War.

Growing up in an apocalyptic cult wasn’t nearly as hard as leaving it.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.